President Donald Trump’s handpicked senator has sparked mockery with a bizarre take on healthcare.
Darline Graham called universal healthcare a “bad idea” and cited her own personal experience to make the case against it—apparently oblivious to the glaring contradiction in her argument as she said her parents died when she was young because they could never go see a doctor.
“My parents worked long, hard hours to make ends meet,” she said to supporters after winning a Republican Senate runoff in South Carolina. “We didn’t take vacations. If they were sick, they had to get up and go to work because the doors weren’t open; we weren’t making money.”
She continued, “My mother passed away when I was 11, and my father just over a year later.”
Mockery of the 62-year-old nepo politician—appointed in July to replace her late brother, Lindsey Graham—quickly followed.
“This is the craziest argument against universal health care I have ever heard,” MeidasTouch co-founder Brett Meiselas wrote on X, receiving over 6,000 likes.
His feelings were echoed across the platform.
“You’d think that was an argument FOR healthcare, not against it,” read one of the top replies to a viral video of Graham’s remarks. “What a f-----g poser.”
The progressive podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen wrote, “The Republican healthcare plan: Work nonstop and die before your kids reach high school.”
Jeopardy champ Hemant Mehta received thousands of likes on his criticism of Graham, too.
“She’s complaining about the Democrat who wants everyone to have health care... while explaining how her parents died young because they couldn’t see doctors,” he wrote.
Graham’s mother died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 51. Her father died about 15 months later from a heart attack in his sleep, leaving her and Lindsey orphaned as teenagers. Reports say he was in his mid-to-late 60s.
Graham, who narrowly survived her Republican primary, will now face Democratic nominee Dr. Annie Andrews in November. South Carolina is considered a dark red state, with Trump winning it by 18 points in 2024, but early polling in a hypothetical Graham-Andrews matchup shows the race tightening.
Trump has gone all in on getting Graham elected despite her lack of experience—and her own wild admission on a debate stage that she knows nothing about key national security issues, which she said is simply “not my thing.”
The president held a rally for her on Friday, a telerally on Monday, and has posted repeatedly in her support. He has even put his money where his mouth is, with the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC spending $800,000 to carry her over the finish line in the primary.
